Editor's Introduction

Introduction

In 2020 we are beginning what we hope will become a new tradition, the guest editorial. The African Studies Review has an enormous reach, and we seek to expand this audience by offering a podium for our editors and editorial board members to share some of their thoughts and concerns. I'm delighted this issue begins with a thoughtful reflection on perhaps the greatest challenge of our time, climate change, and what we as Africanists can do about it, by our editor Benjamin Talton.

The Climate Crisis: The Challenge for A New African Consensus

In 2019, Mozambicans endured two devastating cyclones within a span of five weeks. Both storms hovered nearly stationary for days and left historic floods in their wake. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees reported that the storms internally displaced 146,000 people, leaving 1.85 million in need of humanitarian assistance.

Following a worldwide spike in extreme climate events in recent decades, Africa has experienced some of the world's most intense climate extremes, including heat waves, floods, and intense storms, as recent events in Mozambique highlight, which have contributed to droughts, crop failures, and displacement. In 2017 alone, climate shocks displaced over 68 million people globally, a figure higher than in any previous year. Yet, international law does not recognize the refugee status of those displaced by climate crises. The rising number of "climate refugees" with little to no legal recourse within their own countries and no legal right to asylum abroad are among the increasingly urgent ramifications of the climate crisis.

The dangerously high carbon emissions that contribute to climate change and precipitate climate shocks are well beyond the control of African leaders. Indeed, they reflect the detrimental global economic and political imbalance that has left the people of the poorer nations of the world literally dying as a direct consequence of wealthier nations' long history of privileging economic growth over good stewardship of the environment. The recent United Nations Emissions Gap Report reminds us that the world's 20 richest countries are responsible for more than three-fourths of worldwide emissions, whereas African nations collectively account for little more than 3 percent of global emissions.

How might stakeholders mitigate the effects of the climate crisis, address its causes, and ensure that individuals, communities, and governments are prepared to adapt to the social, environmental, and economic changes that the worsening crisis will undoubtedly bring? Ideally, climate refugees and the foreboding size and growing regularity of "irregular" climate events in Africa will galvanize collective action beyond policymakers and scientists, to include artists, activists, and scholars in the humanities and social sciences. But this will only happen with increased awareness. The enormity of the climate crisis for Africa's present and future means we must confront it as the consensus priority in African affairs.

The integral role of African leaders in ending white-minority rule in southern Africa, namely Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa, which became the consensus African affairs priority during the 1970s and 1980s, demonstrates how current leaders, artists, and scholars might join together to shift the dominant paradigm on the climate crisis. The global movement against white-minority rule in southern Africa provides an important lesson in economic and political solidarity and its capacity to foment course-shifting changes in global relations.

Like the climate crisis, white-minority rule in southern Africa was generally accepted in the West as the status quo, until a consensus emerged from within the continent against imperialism that clearly defined the moral lines. Given Zambia, Tanzania, and, after 1980, Zimbabwe's proximity to white-minority ruled South Africa, it was natural for those countries to lead in providing military and political assistance to the African National Congress's military campaigns. But ending Portuguese rule, until 1975, and then white-minority rule in South Africa and Rhodesia were the consensus foreign affairs issues among African leaders throughout much of the continent, global south, and among African Americans. It took African political leaders, artists, and intellectual allies during the 1970s and 1980s to redefine the narrative on white-minority rule in Africa through their savvy...